Single parents find supportive environment on college campuses

Denise Pierson is one of 19 single parents — mostly undergraduates — living in the 30 apartments in Sunflower Court, the University of Illinois at Springfield's designated family housing complex..

Kelsea Gurski

Denise Pierson sat at her kitchen table in her apartment on the University of Illinois at Springfield campus on a dreary Wednesday evening.

A dusting of snow covered the stairs to the second-floor home in Sunflower Court. In the courtyard below, large puddles of water remained from the prior day’s rain.

Wearing comfy pants and a T-shirt, Denise was surrounded by a stack of textbooks and notebooks to her left, a laptop to her right and a dry-erase board an arm’s reach in front of her that once had her month’s schedule written on it.

The writing had mysteriously disappeared earlier in the week. She had an idea of whom to blame.

Sitting at a child-sized table next to her was 3-year-old Jaela, the sneaky calendar eraser, who was finishing up some salad so she could have a pink-frosted cookie for dessert.

Later, the toddler, a Spider-Man and Power Rangers fan, moved to a little chair facing a TV stand in the corner of an otherwise bare living room to watch cartoons. Pierson, a UIS junior, worked on her schoolwork.

The 24-year-old stayed in the kitchen with her laptop; though her apartment is furnished in other rooms, she has refused to buy a couch. It would be too tempting to join Jaela for a few minutes of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” she said.

She doesn’t have time for distractions.

Pierson is one of 19 single parents — mostly undergraduates — living in the 30 apartments in Sunflower Court, the university’s designated family housing complex tucked away on the far east side of the university property. This semester is the first she’s lived on campus.

Recently divorced and with full custody of her daughter, Pierson commuted from Peoria in the fall before learning she could qualify for assistance to live on campus, should she make the move.

“I did well enough (grade-wise) that I took the idea that I should just move,” she said. “(But) I wasn’t sure how money would be a factor.”

She found grants that covered tuition, books and housing. And she found a job at Lake Shore Learning Center, where Jaela attends day care, to cover her car payment, gas and Jaela’s child-care fee. So they moved, and Pierson’s balancing act as a single mom, full-time student and employee began.

“It’s a little tricky,” she said. “But it’s actually easier than I ever anticipated it being. I’m just at the point in my life where either you do something, or you don’t. And I just want to do it.”

Still, she said, “basically all week is crazy.”

Her typical Monday-through-Thursday schedule goes something like this: Mom and daughter awake at 6 a.m. and arrive at day care by 7:30 a.m. Jaela heads to the 3-year-old room for the day, while Pierson works in the infant room until her shift ends at 1:30 p.m. Then she has class and occasionally some free time to study in the library before picking up Jaela by 6 p.m.

Some days are busier than others. Pierson particularly hates — and dreads — Thursdays, when she must hurry from her afternoon classes to pick up Jaela and drive her to her grandmother’s house a half-hour away so that she can attend a night course that lasts until 9:30 p.m.

Then it’s back in the car to pick up her daughter. The two don’t fall into bed until 11 p.m., more than two hours past their usual bedtime.

“If I make it through Thursdays,” Pierson said, “that’s, like, great.”

On Fridays, the tired mother works at the day care and then does a load of laundry at home before she and Jaela head to Peoria, so Jaela can visit with her dad for the weekend; some weekends, he travels to Springfield to spare them the trip.

While father and daughter bond, Pierson gets some rest and then hits the books, studying up to eight hours each weekend day. Then the week starts again.

Take University Drive around the east side of the UIS campus, and eventually you’ll see, behind some trees, the three brown buildings that make up Sunflower Court. At the driveway entrance is a Springfield Mass Transit Bus stop, where a Ball-Chatham School District bus also stops on weekdays; a small basketball court is at the end of the drive, past the parked minivans and four-door sedans.

Big Wheels and child-sized bicycles are scattered throughout the property. A playground stands empty to the north of the apartments, awaiting warmer weather.

This isn’t a typical student-housing scene, nor is it one found on every college campus, said John Ringle, UIS director of housing and resident life, though it is common at larger universities. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, offers two apartment buildings for families or single parents.

In the past year or so, UIS housing officials have strived to place all single parents in Sunflower Court, Ringle said, because it’s beneficial to the parents to be able to form a community. Past practice was to split them between there and another apartment complex.

“It helps as they try to share child-care responsibilities or laundry chores or watching the kids on the playground, or waiting at the bus stop,” he said.

“It’s probably the most supportive environment you’ll ever find in any neighborhood you’ll ever live in, because the resident students kind of tend to look after each other, and they’re going through shared experiences where they are trying to juggle academics, child-rearing, work and relationships all at once,” Ringle said. “They’re all in this together, and that makes it easier to understand what your neighbors are going through, I think.”

Sunflower Court was built in 1980 and is one of the two oldest residential facilities on campus. Though designated as “family housing,” the one- and two-bedroom apartments also house a few childless married couples and is open to couples in established domestic partnerships.

With children living on campus, the university takes additional precautions. To protect the safety of the children, the university conducts background checks on both the student tenants and any other adults living with them; it also makes sure the playground equipment continues to meet safety standards.

There is one resident adviser, fifth-year senior Tim McMillin, assigned to the apartments; his job is to trouble-shoot and organize family-friendly programming events. Also a single parent, McMillin, 23, said living in family housing as been “very beneficial.”

Though his almost-5-year-old son, Eric, stays with him only every other weekend, living in the campus’ other residential apartments was out of the question, he said.

“I didn’t really feel comfortable having a lot of roommates,” McMillin said. “When you’re living with four different people, which would be the case pretty much anywhere on campus, that’s a lot of personalities coming together. And there’s a lot of people in their 20s that aren’t ready to have a kid around.”

The child-friendly environment that UIS provides was a big draw three years ago for 30-year-old Aimee Goodman. A psychology and criminal justice double major, she’s had her hands full the entire time.

When she first moved from the Chicago area, where she had been studying at Joliet Junior College, it was just Goodman and then-3-year-old son, Jozef. Last August, baby Jordan joined the family.

During her college search, Goodman said she learned the University of Illinois had a campus in Springfield. What she found was a somewhat atypical college environment seemingly conducive to raising a child.

“When I came here to visit, it looked more family-oriented, more safe,” she said. “It just seemed better since I had a 3-year-old at the time, so that’s why I ended up coming here.

“I didn’t want him to be around a lot of younger students and a lot of partying and a lot of noise. I didn’t want him exposed to anything. The safety of my child came first, but I did want to live on campus.”

Goodman is on track to graduate in May and then pursue a master’s degree focusing on women in the criminal justice system. While the light at the tunnel is growing brighter for her, that wasn’t the case a year ago. Pregnancy complications and diabetes slowed Goodman to the point where she almost gave up.

“I wanted to,” she said. “(I was telling myself), ‘No, I’m not doing this no more — pack up and leave.’ But then when you think about it, OK, I’m going to have two kids now. I can’t support the one I have — this is why I’m here.”

So she stayed. When she had Jordan, now almost 6 months old, her fall schedule was set to take classes online. This semester, she’s back in the classroom two days a week. Jordan’s dad has those two days off from work so he can baby-sit.

Until she finds an opening at a day-care facility for Jordan, she’s unable to get a part-time job, and her work-study grant expired this year. And though Jozef, now 6, is a helpful big brother, finding chunks of time to study is nearly impossible.

“When I had just Jozef … I could sit down for two hours when he went to sleep,” she said. “Now, if I have to do something that takes two hours, it takes me all week. Two hours before class, you can’t write a paper — you just can’t. I learned to start things early because I used to procrastinate.”

She estimates she gets a few hours of sleep per night. Jordan has yet to settle into a sleep schedule, so the sleep she does get always is interrupted.

In the early morning hours last Monday, Goodman was cleaning and doing laundry until 2:30 a.m. An hour later, she was up again with Jordan. By 4 a.m., she was back in bed, but only until 6:30 a.m. when it was time to get Jozef ready to catch the school bus. She caught a couple more hours late morning, but that was it.

When she’s not in class, she often fills her afternoons providing child care for other parents, meeting the elementary school children at the bus stop, and making sure they are looked after if their parents aren’t home.

“It’s very overwhelming,” she said. “You don’t just go to class and come home and that’s it. … The day doesn’t end.”

It helps to know that what she’s working toward will get her somewhere someday, and that she accomplished everything on her own.

“It’s kind of like a relief,” she said. “I know I’ll be able to get a good enough job just with my bachelor’s, even if I just take night classes for my master’s. So that’s a relief.”

Nationally, about 13 percent of college students are single parents, according to statistics from the 2003-04 school year (the most recent data available) compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics. Seventy percent of single parents are female. Forty percent are full-time students.

Single parents face the greatest obstacles to completing their post-secondary education compared to students with no children or those who are married, particularly because of the lack of spousal support, the NCES reported.

Even so, said UIS’ Ringle, most single parents fare well considering their circumstances.

“I would say that the majority probably persist to graduation, or at least persist to get an associate’s degree or something that prepares them to go out and continue to be successful in the working world,” he said.

Several resources exist to help single parents succeed in school. Nearly every single parent living on the UIS campus qualifies for a temporary assistance for needy families scholarship, made available by a grant through the Illinois Department of Human Services.

The TANF scholarship available to UIS students goes by the same name as a national TANF grant, said UIS financial assistance director Jerry Joseph. However, it provides funds for a wider spectrum of needs, including housing costs, books and any tuition and fees that the national Pell Grant or Illinois Monetary Award Program don’t cover.

Students must be enrolled in classes to be eligible.

Rebecca Hoffman, 21, said she is “very thankful” for the financial help she’s received. But the single mother of two still works part-time three days during the week and on most weekends to make ends meet.

Hoffman, son Caleb, 4, and daughter Hayley, 2, moved to UIS last semester from Quincy, where Hoffman had attended John Wood Community College. The proximity to Quincy, where the children’s grandparents live, and the day-care facility on campus were big selling points for her, in addition to the university’s reputable psychology program. A junior, she plans to complete her bachelor’s degree by spring 2009.

One of the biggest obstacles Hoffman said she has faced is balancing her roles as a student and a mother, particularly when her children are ill. Little did she realize how often kids new to day care get sick.

“They’ve gotten just about everything you can think of,” she said. “And last semester, they got me sick and I missed two weeks of classes … and if you miss a quiz or exam, they usually don’t let you retake it.”

During finals last semester, Hoffman, determined not to fall behind, took an ailing Hayley with her to her professor’s office to take a final. Hayley sat at her side as her mother completed the test.

Hoffman said she wasn’t sure at first if she’d make it through the school year, but now that she’s more than halfway through, she believes they are doing well. She may never find enough time to read as many storybooks or play as many games of Candy Land with her children as she’d like, or be able to attend student activities on campus with her peers in the evenings, but she knows the sacrifices are small.

“I just kind of want to show the kids you can do anything you put your mind to,” she said.